Douglas Crowe

We Write Your book, so You Don't Have to. Ghost Writing, Publishing & Book Launch Experts. Consult for #Entrepreneur, #CEO, #startup, #IPO.

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

You may already have the expertise enterprise clients need. But can you get into the right conversation? That's where relationships matter.
The Retained Advisor | Oct 19–20 | $7
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[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.

My observations:

1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.

2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.

3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.

4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.

5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.

6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.

They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.

7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.

8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.

Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.

10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!

11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.

12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.

13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.

14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.

15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.

16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.

17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?

18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.

19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.

20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.

21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.

Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.

Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.

Happy to be home and locked in.

Until next time!

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

What if expertise isn't what's keeping you from bigger clients?

Being qualified doesn't guarantee access. The right relationships can change that.

Join Doug Crowe for The Retained Advisor.

Oct 19–20 | 1 PM ET | $7
https://t.co/BlqOuAFF2r

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Networking gets you contacts. Strategic relationships get you conversations that matter.

The difference can change your business.

Join me Oct 19–20 for The Retained Advisor. Just $7.

https://t.co/BlqOuAFF2r

[X Ethan @XEthanai]

The truth will set you free

-Elon musk

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

@IvankaTrumbg0c 16?

[Oren John @orenmeetsworld]

Brands cannot tell single stories anymore, they need to build worlds.

Eugene and I break down how White Lotus echoes the challenges of modern marketing 👇

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Samuel Vazquez - 02 Jun 26 - SignalLayer - AI, Hiring Mismatches... https://t.co/l5TIkWBZGj via @YouTube

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

How to Think Like a 10-Figure Founder and Build a Brand That Outlasts Yo... https://t.co/3iQ9uMOMVs via @YouTube

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Why Self-Healing Is the Next Frontier of Medicine https://t.co/y1tUn9DUhu via @LinkedIn

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Bold CEOs Turn Volatility Into Strategic Advantage, EY Survey Finds https://t.co/Mp2StZfScO via @LinkedIn

[Lance Scoular🧭🌐The Savvy Navigator @LanceScoular]

📙Mind Body Business
The 3 Pillars of Success: Leveraging the Connection Between
Author: @BrianCarlKelly CEO @ReachYourPeakL1
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📚📙📘
@LanceScoular The Savvy Navigator🧭🌐
#amazoninfluencer #book #ad #amazonbooks #fromtheauthorsmouth

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[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

I just bought Hoover a coffee on @buymeacoffee! 🎉

You can support them here — https://t.co/MtV9myHlch

[Micha Kaufman @michakaufman]

If you have one of these three areas of expertise, AI won’t replace you. On the contrary - you are the ingredient it lacks.

1. Specialized Execution
 While AI provides general solutions, the path from prototype to production requires specific expertise. The security engineer who spots vulnerabilities, the growth marketer who understands conversion psychology, the DevOps specialist who knows why things break at scale, these aren’t just service providers, they’re the bridge between possibility and reality.

2. Taste and Judgment
When everyone has access to the same AI tools, competitive advantage shifts from capability to curation. Success belongs not to those who can generate the most options, but to those who can recognize and refine the exceptional.

3. Complex Orchestration 
Real products require more than features, they need coherent vision, accountability, and the ability to navigate the thousands of micro-decisions AI cannot make. Someone must conduct the symphony, not just play the notes.

Human talent is more necessary than ever.

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Peter Goldstein Of Exchange Listing LLC: Five Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Became A CEO by @ChayaWeiner https://t.co/9XxSx3JO0t

[∩ @zachpogrob]

"We called every single fan who bought a ticket and thanked them, for the first seven years. That's 100,000+ calls."

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Ghostwriting Strategist on AI, Deepfakes & Building Human Connection https://t.co/oPldqbKzwM via @YouTube

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Could you help me with a friend's book launch today? Just a click on the old Amazon FREE BOOK link (KDP) and you'll earn big karma points. THANKS!

https://t.co/I6pXhLFB9S

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

@scrapingdog I just signed up to finish building an app to help authors. Thanks for the API!

[Douglas Crowe @authoryourbrand]

Artificial Intelligence & Humanity - Together Forever! Making The Most o... https://t.co/8FU5PsbJhp via @YouTube